getting around it. The Bills haven’t
made the playoffs since I was in elementary school. The Sabres haven’t
been good since Briere and Drury wore
slugs on their sweaters. The marketing
concept “One Buffalo” isn’t about community spirit or civic pride. The tie that
binds the Bills and the Sabres together
is failure. Both teams have been medi-ocre-to-lousy for the better part of a
decade.

Each year, the Bills playoff hopes go
from “In the Hunt” to hunted sometime in mid-December. It’s so predictable at this point that most fans are
only disappointed in themselves for getting swept up in hoping.

After a brief but remarkable stretch
of postseason success, Buffalo sports
fans were mourning the loss of Sabres
co-captains Daniel Briere and Chris
Drury to free agency. Regier and Sabres
managing partner Larry Quinn held a
tense thirty-minute press conference to
answer questions and quell fears that
the sky was falling. They were doing
fine, more or less, until Regier cut
Quinn off to say flat-out that the team
won’t be as good without its two captains.

Regier was right about being lesscompetitive. He was wrong about basi-cally everything else that followed.

Buffalo sports are bad. There’s noAnd sure, I’ll admit, there was a briefperiod where the Sabres were genuinelyfun this decade. They won the North-east Division in 2010 because RyanMiller had the best year of his life, andhe dragged the US Olympic Team andthe Sabres along with him. But thenext season was mostly smoke andmirrors—a mediocre squad caught upin the enthusiasm that came when Ter-ry Pegula bought the team. That enthu-siasm ended after seven playoff gamesagainst Philadelphia.

The next five seasons were the least
competitive in franchise history. And
some of it was intentional. The people
in charge had had enough mediocrity
and decided to go with bad. On purpose. It was controversial and hard to
watch, but it worked. The Sabres now
have a group of young players like Sam
Reinhart and Jack Eichel only because

Game On/To compete againBY RYAN NAGELHOUT“We’re going to be less competitive.”It’s a line made famous in Buffalo sports nearly a decadeago, but no one really knew how true it would be whenSabres general manager Darcy Regier said it on July 2, 2007.

Nicholas Hebert (CAN) and Jack Eichel (USA) fight for the puck as Canada plays the USA in the men’s IIHL World Junior Championship hockey
tournament on January 15, 2012 in Innsbruck, Austria. Incidently, this December, the 2018 World Junior Championship is slated to be hosted by
Buffalo with games at KeyBank Center and HarborCenter. Also, for the first time ever, an outdoor tournament game will be played at New Era Field
on New Year’s Eve.